Saturday, December 20, 2014

High School Apartheid in Ohio (Cuyahoga County too!)

I downloaded from the Ohio Department of Education a spreadsheet of data from all Ohio public schools disaggregated by race (a subset of the 13-14 school year "report card" data). Pivot table by school, District, and County, choosing high schools by excluding any school that didn't have 10th grade OGT Reading pass rate (there could conceivably be a very small, very new (9th only so far), or 11-12 only HS excluded that way. There are also some schools serving more than grades 9-12 whose other students are included - I excluded OHVA and ECOT because with 5% of the students in the file, these 2 K12 virtual schools are by far the biggest contributors to non-HS students in this file and removing them doesn't change the statewide % of White and African-American ethnicity. But this is the overwelming % of HS students in the state and the overwhelming % of students shown here are HS only).

So last year there were 836 high schools in Ohio enrolling 544,249 students, 16% of whom were African-American and 79% Caucasian (actually labeled "Black" and "White" with the other 5% labeled Asian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, or Multi-Racial). 481 or 58% of them had student bodies reported as 100% "White", comprising 39% of student enrollment. By contrast, one-third of all "Black" students were reported in 81 high schools that were 100% "Black".

Think it's a rural-urban issue? Cuyahoga County had 75 high schools (OCA excluded because its population is statewide), 32 of which reported 100% "Black" students (11,293 or 54% of all "Black" students in Cuyahoga County attend an ALL "Black" high school). 17 of the 76 schools had NO "Black" students in 13-14 (one small one had only Hispanic Students). 16 Cuyahoga County schools enrolling 23% of "White" high school students in the County have NO "Black" students.
In an urban county with 50% "White" and 42% "Black" students, only 9556 or 19% attended the 9 high schools that were within 20% points of that county-wide average "White" percentage (32% at Washington Park HS and 74% at Lakewood HS).

28,245 students (56%) attended the 53 high schools (7 of 10 schools) that were either had no White students (and all but one were all Black) or had fewer than 4% Black students (17 had none). Here's a list of schools sorted by 13-14 enrollment with the % White and % Black.